Download the current release image from here:

This guide refers to the installation media as a "USB stick", however, OpenELEC can be installed on any media such as an SSD, SD card, thumb drive, or a conventional HDD. Be aware that installing OpenELEC on removable media (a USB stick or SD card), you will not be able to suspend you computer.

Raspberry Pi 1 and 2 / Freescale iMX6 / Wetek Play will need to use one of the below operating systems as a host for writing the diskimage to their SD card.

Note: Please pick the appropriate guide depending on which operating system you are going to use to create the USB stick.

Next we need to write the disk image. You'll need superuser privileges to do this, whether you use the root user or sudo. Either way, you need to execute the following command:

dd if=OpenELEC-Generic.x86_64-5.0.0-efi.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M

It's very important that you make sure you have the right device as it will be wiped as part of the process.
For example, it's extremely unlikely that your device will be /dev/sda, as that's almost always the first hard disk in your computer.

Note: make sure there's nothing important on your USB Stick as the above command will wipe ALL data on it.

Lastly ensure the changes are synced to the USB Stick before removing it:

sync

Extracting the archive using the GUI

Simple double click the OpenELEC-build-architecture-version.img.gz file in the finder to let archive utility extract it for you.

Extracting the archive using the CLI (Command Line Interface)

Open the Terminal.

Change to the folder where you downloaded the release archive to (lets assume the Downloads folder in your home directory):

cd ~/Downloads

Then extract the archive. It will be named OpenELEC-build-architecture-version.img.gz. We need to use gunzip to extract the archive.

gunzip -d OpenELEC-Generic.x86_64-5.0.0-efi.img.gz

Creating the USB Stick

Insert your USB stick and open a terminal window and run the following

Next we need to zero out the partition map, OSX has an issue if you don't do this

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=1024 count=1

Next we need to write the disk image. You'll need superuser privileges to do this, whether you use the root user or sudo. Either way, you need to execute the following command:

dd if=OpenELEC-Generic.x86_64-5.0.0-efi.img of=/dev/rdisk1 bs=4m

Note: We need to use the OSX specific /dev/rdisk1

It's very important that you make sure you have the right device as it will be wiped as part of the process.
For example, it's extremely unlikely that your device will be /dev/sda, as that's almost always the first hard disk in your computer.

Note: make sure there's nothing important on your USB Stick as the above command will wipe ALL data on it.

Lastly ensure the changes are synced to the USB Stick before removing it:

sync

This will install the OpenELEC disk image to your USB stick using Windows.